Posts on iowafloyd - an engineering blog

Automate to Delegate the Small Stuff

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 09:43:54 -0600

The What

If you get to know me for any length of time, you’ll come to find that I’m a huge proponent of personal finance and all that it entails. I’m especially vocal about budgeting and how, contrary to popular opinion, “budget” is anything but a bad word — it’s one of the most powerful tools and skill sets required for a person to become financially independent.

The hard part about budgeting is getting started and sticking to it long enough to make it a habit, and eventually part of your everyday life. When I had graduated college and had my first professional job, I had budgeted from day one so that I could pay off my student loans as quickly as possible. That was around the year 2008-2009. Which, if you think about it, was the pre-smartphone era. Cell phones were ubiquitous, but without touch screens or much of anything besides a physical keyboard and a tiny ~2” LCD screen. For a bit of nostalgia, this was the cutting edge of technology: CES: Best Smartphones of 2008

Project Management in Excel

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:08:43 -0500

Why project management?

The curriculum at Iowa State University taught me a lot (statics, mechanics, thermodynamics, procrastination is a LOT harder in college…), but it didn’t teach me anything about project management. Why is that? I’ve had to use some form of project management in my daily professional life since day one.

I’m betting that project management is just one of those things that’s hard to put into a textbook. Because (at least in my experience) you only really learn project management when Plan A goes sideways. So you make Plan B… half of which goes sideways. So you make… You get it.

Hello World

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 18:00:00 -0600

Hello, World!

I am iowafloyd.

As you may have guessed from the moniker, I:

live in the United States state of Iowa, and
am very much influenced by the Prog Rock band Pink Floyd.

Iowafloyd has been my online self ever since I created my first email address in the mid-90’s.

I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering, and mechanical engineering has been my profession since the late 20-aughts. In my spare time, however, and when the need arises in my day job, I code. My company’s IT team limits me to Excel and VBA, but outside of work I’ve used